Oral S3 20b 100tkrazitprotocol; The Amazon Web Services (AWS) company was founded in 2006 and has since grown to become one of the largest tech-companies in the world, with over 100 technical teams spanning 6 continents. It is primarily used for cloud computing which helps multiple companies throughout the world to deliver their services without worrying about server-size issues or being too costly. AWS allows companies to launch websites, software applications and other services on a massive scale by using a pool of computing power that they can build upon as needed.
One of the most critical services is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which was originally established in March of 2003 to help power the early stages of Amazon’s digital library. The storage service has since grown to store more than 100 trillion bytes within its system and provides a highly reliable hosting on which scientists, engineers and data analysts can manipulate their data. S3 has become widely used by many companies including NASA, Netflix, Reddit, Pinterest, and Airbnb.
The following is an oral history of Amazon’s cloud storage service, S3. The interview, which was conducted by two Columbia Engineering students, were collected from the AWS technical teams and feature information on how S3 was originally developed and how it has grown to store the data of millions of companies and millions of users across the world.
Excerpts from the oral history…
Early stages of S3 (2003) : It’s very difficult to retroactively determine what was known and not known. At the time, Amazon’s core business was selling books online. Storage services had been used by us internally to run our website; they were getting very big, and we knew we could use them to make our business more efficient. We thought customers could use it to make their businesses more efficient as well. We had a team in San Francisco and they started working on a prototype storage service. We built it, and it was obvious very quickly that we could offer something good to customers.We had no idea exactly what kind of features or functionality would be valuable to customers, but we knew that building a service of this type would attract a lot of users, because they would have to pay us to use it. This is how S3 got started.
The early days of S3 (2003-2004): A lot of our engineering resources went into making the service scalable and fast, to be able to deliver a lot of performance on a small amount of infrastructure. It was fairly easy to do that from the beginning, because AWS was such a small company at the time. We had been working on this for about 18 months and we probably deployed it in under six months by using conventional server software. We had to write our own software for a lot of other parts, because there wasn’t something off the shelf that we could use.
“I think that people at Amazon probably said ‘why are we doing this?’ But they also recognized that it was an interesting technical problem to solve, and I don’t think it was incredibly contentious.
